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Wednesday, December 31, 2014

I screwed up posting Greg Sailor and Carson Schutze's 4th Hilbert question. It's on ellipsis and when I copied the file onto the blog all the elision was elided. As you might imagine, this makes it harder to understand their interesting point. It is now fixed I believe. So please take a fresh look at it here.

Monday, December 29, 2014

If God is in the details, Vyvyan Evans’ writings on generative
linguistics are profane. What follows is a little illustrative example and how
bad the arguments are.

As mentioned before (see here,
here,
and here),
Evans, like many before him, seems to have difficulty understanding the concept
of a universal as used by generative grammarians of the Chomsky stripe.
Evidence? Consider this discussion of the wh-island
constraint (76-7 in his book; in a chapter entitled “Are There Linguistic
Universals?”). Evans illustrates the constraint using the following contrasting
English examples:

(1)a.
Where did the supermodel say that the window cleaner had to get off the train
to meet her

b.
* Where did the supermodel say whether the window cleaner had to get off the
train to meet her

Evans argues that typological considerations prove that the
contrast above cannot be attributed to a universal “rule” because it fails to
hold in “other Indo-European languages such as Italian and Russian.”

Let me start with what may seem a persnickety comment: The wh-island constraint is not often
thought of as a “rule” but as a condition on
rules. This may sound like an innocuous distinction, but it actually isn’t. It
reflects what I think is the basic underlying confusion permeating Evans’
discussions: the inability to distinguish Greenberg Universals (which aim to
describe surface patterns) and Chomsky Universals (which aim to describe the
generative properties of Gs and FL).The
former are intended to be surface true, the latter cannot be. While there is a
direct relationship between a surface pattern and a rule in the case of
Greenberg Universals, no such direct relation exists in the second.Thus, as
a matter of logic, it takes more than a review of contrasting surface
patterns to debunk a Chomsky universal. It requires a discussion of the rules
that generate said surface forms (i.e. a discussion of the generative
procedures (i.e. Gs)). As we shall see, Evans’ discussion is entirely oblivious
to this, and this makes his critique entirely worthless, as will become clear
as we proceed.

So, let’s return to Evans’ discussion. What’s the “invalid” universal
rule that Evans aims to debunk? It’s the following: A wh-word cannot intervene between the two clauses in a question.
What’s the problem according to Evans? In some languages [Italian and
Russian-NH], “a wh-word can intervene
between the two clauses in a question” (77). So, according to Evans the
universal rule says “no intervening wh-words
between clauses in questions” and Italian and Russian allow such intervening wh-words. Thus, the universal rule is
invalid.In other words, by examining
the surface forms in three different languages Evans concludes that a proposed
universal, motivated by English data, is not universal after all.

Evans’ argument here is very instructive.For it fails in almost every way imaginable,
as I will show. But before deconstructing it, let me start by saying that there
is nothing wrong at looking at more than one language to investigate linguistic
universals.[1]
Generativists do this all the time. As David Pesetsky notes hereeven big bad Chomsky thinks that this is
a very good thing to do (Evans seems loath to concede this point despite his
evident misquotation (please take a look at the Facebook discussion linked to
above. This is really egregiously bad behavior on Evans’ part)). So, the idea
that cross linguistic investigations are relevant to establishing universal
properties of Gs and FL is as close to a truism as there is today among
practicing generativists.However, if
you do this, you need to do this right, and, sad to say, Evans’s discussion is
seriously defective. Let’s count the ways.

First, as already noted, Evans’ criticism understands the
universal to be one about surface forms (viz. can a wh-word intervene between “two clauses in a question”). Sadly, as
it stands, this is an incorrect description of the relevant phenomenon. How do
I know? Because sentences like (2) are fine in English even though “a wh-word intervenes between two clauses
in a question”:

(2)Who
did the supermodel ask whether the window cleaner had to get off the train to
meet her

The correct description of the phenomenon Evans is
interested in requires fixing where the wh
comes from and this requires more than mere surface description. In particular,
it requires determining the underlying source of the wh-word (i.e. roughly its DS-position). The generalization that
covers (1) and (2) is that it the wh
that is sentence initial cannot hail from the embedded clause. Note that in
(1b) the sentence is only unacceptable if where
is querying the getting-off. The sentence is fine if we are questioning where
the saying occurred.So the structure
that is ungrammatical is (3a)
(corresponding to (1a)) with the indicated trace annotating the relevant illicit
dependency while (3b) and (3c) are fully grammatical.[2]
This is why the matrix reading of (1b) where where modifies the saying is fully acceptable. I leave as an
exercise for you (and Evans) to explain why (2) is also fine and fully
acceptable (hint: note where the trace of where
sits in (3c)).

(3)a.
Where1 did the supermodel say that the window cleaner had to get off
the train t1 to meet her

b. Where1 did the supermodel say t1 that the window
cleaner had to get off the train to meet her

c.
Who1 did the supermodel ask t1 whether the window cleaner
had to get off the train to meet her

So, first conclusion, Evans’ discussion does not really
describe the data correctly and
furthermore to do the English data descriptive
justice requires looking at more than the surface (string) features of the
sentence. We need, at least, sound-meaning pairs to get the data described correctly
and this requires some conception of underlying form, something that is not string
visible. This is what good typological work currently does and Evans’
discussion does not.

Second problem: Evans’ discussion gets the facts wrong even
allowing for the first adjustment. The contrast he claims to hold between
English on the one hand and Italian/Russian on the other does not hold in questions.Sentences
analogous to (1) with structure (3a) are unacceptable in Italian/Russian too.
Question formation in both languages appears to yield unacceptability when
extracting one question ­wh over
another question wh.[3]
What Evans probably meant to report is that the wh-island condition fails to appear in the Italian analogues of
(4):

(4)The
book that John asked whether to review

This was first noted by Rizzi in his justly celebrated paper
on island effect variations. Rizzi noted that wrt relativization (not question formation) it appears to be
possible to extract the relative operator out of the embedded question with
acceptable results.As Grimshaw noted
not long afterwards, examples like (4) also seem pretty acceptable in English,
so Rizzi’s noted contrast between the two languages might be inaccurate (I for
example find (4) quite acceptable).At
any rate, this is the kind of counterexample to the wh-island constraint that Generativists started studying in the mid
1980s. Research led to a proposal that largely saved the universal principle. We return to this in a moment, but
first another problem with Evans’ set up of the discussion.

Note that in the example in (4) the head of the relative
clause controls an argument position inside the relative (the object of review). In the examples in (1), where is an adjunct. There are well
known differences between arguments and adjuncts as they relate to islands,
viz. adjuncts are far more susceptible to the wh-island condition than arguments are. Thus, (5) is considerably
less acceptable than (4) (again with the head modifying the place of the
interview (viz. roughly, a relativized version of “John asked whether to
interview MD in NYC):

(5)?*The
city that/where John asked whether to interview Moby Dick

So, Evans’ illustrative examples are triply unfortunate:
they mis-describe the typological contrast (questions are uniform across the three cited languages wrt unacceptability),
they mis-describe the generalization (the underlying source of the wh is critical), and they focus on the
wrong cases as the contrast of interest emerges largely with argument extraction,
adjuncts being more recalcitrant and quite uniform in their behavior cross-linguistically.

This noted, let’s put these details aside and simply assume
that Evans’ discussion does not go off the rails from the get go (though it
does and this should tell you something about whether Evans’ criticism is
serious (which, of course it isn’t) given that even the simple description of the generalization it
“debunks” is so inaccurate), though It should make you wonder how trustworthy
the critic is if he can’t get the basic descriptive facts right.

Ok, where are we? We have a purported difference between
English on the one hand versus Italian (and Russian) on the other concerning
extraction out of embedded questions in relative clauses. Does this debunk the universal
as Evans’ discussion claims? Not really. The whole discussion, as I noted, was
initiated by Rizzi in the context of grounding Ross-like Island generalizations
more deeply in a more general theory of locality.[4]
Here’s a slightly ahistorical reconstruction.

Rizzi noted the contrast between English and French
regarding extraction out of wh-islands.
He offered an explanation for this that preserved
an important linguistic universal (the subjacency condition) by allowing the
category of bounding nodes to differ across Gs (CP and DP for Italian, TP and DP
for English).Given this parametric
variation, both English and Italian (and Russian) Gs obeyed the same universal subjacency
condition (i.e. movement across more than a single bounding node is illicit in
all Gs). In other words, the relevant generalization due to Rizzi is that there
exists a universal structural condition on movement that is notin
any way undermined by the observed differences between Italian and English
that Rizzi reported. As you can see, this universal is very abstract (it
relates to G processes and structures, not output forms) and cannot be
contested by citing surface differences the way that Evans’ discussion does.[5]

In short, even when
corrected for the evident mis-descriptions, Evans’ discussion is simply irrelevant
to what generative grammarians have understood universals to be. Thus, Evans’
discussion is just another example of the confusion rampant in his writing
between structural universals of the Chomsky variety (that have to do with
properties of Gs and FL) and surface typological universals of the Greenberg
variety (that mainly describes the string properties of surface forms). And
this is a very big deal. It indicates that Evans’ discussions (aside
from indicating a lack of fluency with the relevant literature) is simply
beside the point logically. His
criticisms miss the mark because they are not targeted at the right concept of
universal.

Let me put this another way: Evans writes as if differing
typological patterns are in and of themselves problems for the generative
conception of universals. But this is to misunderstand what a grammatical
universal is. It is not the description of patterns in the data, but principles
of grammatical organization (descriptions of generative procedures). In other
words, though Greenberg universals can be relevant to evaluating Chomsky
universals, it takes a lot of grammatical work to relate them. Evans’ argument
does not do any of this work. Why? Because it fails to recognize the difference
between the two kinds of universals and hence fails to understand what is
logically required to show that a Chomsky (grammatical) is incorrect. This
makes Evans’ critique similar to Emily Litela’s confusion about “soviet
jewelry” (here),
though Emily’s misunderstanding is far more amusing (and, deliberate, unlike
Evans’ critique).

So, here’s the bottom line of our
little illustration: Evans’ specific “criticism” of the work on wh-island effectsin generative grammar is deeply misguided. How deep? Well, the
discussion wins the junk argument trifecta: it is inadequate descriptively,
theoretically and logically. In other words, this is intellectual garbage, pure
and simple. His discussion here is not serious and the charitable should simply
ignore it.I would have done so myself
(indeed, I really want to ignore it) had it remained justly obscure. But it did
not. Rather, Evans’ critique has come to fill a badly needed hole in the
literature.[6]
If only that hole were still unfilled. Make sure you mention this to anyone
that suggests otherwise.[7]

[1]
I should add, perhaps playing into Evans’ hands, that I personally do think
that one can argue for universals
based on investigations of a single G (note, G, not language). This is what POS
arguments do all the time. Of course, no single argument need be dispositive
and it is always worth finding other
kinds of evidence for a proposed universal. But logically speaking,
investigating one G in depth can serve to ground a universal, not unlike
studying just one organisms in depth, say the fruit fly or e-coli or pea
plants, can serve to ground biochemical or genetic generalizations that hold
across many phyla.

[2]
Structures are ‘grammatical’ or not, sentences are ‘acceptable’ or not.
Linguists explain unacceptability in part
via the grammaticality of the structures they supervene on. But the two notions
are distinct and must be kept conceptually separate.

[3]
Of course, whether these derivations are ungrammatical
in Italian/Russian Gs is a further question.

[4]
I say “Ross-like” as Ross himself did not think that the wh-island condition was a true island. It was added by Chomsky
later on based on the mechanics of the theory of subjacency.

[5]
There are other accounts for exceptions to wh-island
effects involving the number of “escape” hatches in a given G. Reinhart
initiated this line of analysis and it is still much with us (under the name of
‘phase edges’). At any rate, this line of inquiry also preserved the subjacency
condition by parameterizing the number of “escape” hatches in CP a given G
allows.

[7]
Last point: the wh-island condition
has been widely discussed in the generative literature. Exactly how to
formulate it is still subject to lots of discussion.The above is not intended to defend nor
debunk it. My sole intention has been to show that whatever the right answer
turns out to be, Evans’ kinds of considerations are conceptually incapable of furthering
the discussion.

Saturday, December 27, 2014

There has been a little Evans induced hiatus from the Hilbert Project. This is too bad, for unlike the Evans' stuff, this is both interesting and valuable. At any rate, I will try to be more diligent in posting these more frequently. Today Craig Sailor and Carson Schütze discuss Ellipsis and one of the leading theories we have about it. Hopefully, this will generate some vigorous discussion.

Ross (1969) observed that an island violation could apparently be overcome or “repaired” if the island were deleted, as in sluicing, where wh-movement occurs out of an elided structure. This could be superficially described as an instance of ellipsis “feeding” an otherwise-illicit application of movement. Over the years, this phenomenon has been thought to extend beyond islands: ellipsis can apparently feed or repair a variety of illicit movements, including unlicensed instances of (multiple) focus movement, head movement, etc. (Merchant 2010).

Recently, though, several authors have leveled convincing arguments against the original claim that ellipsis can repair island violations, showing apparent examples to be illusory (Barros to appear, a.o.). With the foundation of elliptical repair in doubt, the following question arises: To what extent, if any, can ellipsis make an ill-formed structure acceptable?

The structure in (1), in which an XP has moved out of some elided YP, has been ascribed to several ellipsis phenomena (some involving more than one moved XP):

English would require this movement of who independent of the ellipsis; thus, sluicing appears to involve incidental co-occurrence of two discrete syntactic operations (movement and deletion).

Ross noted, though, that the situation might not be this simple. In unreduced wh- questions, wh-movement is prohibited out of islands (e.g. coordinate-structure islands (4)); however, sluiced analogues of such questions are often perfectly acceptable (5).

According to Ross, (4) and (5) differ only in what is pronounced, meaning the two share a structural description containing an island violation (but see below). This led to the proposal that island violations could be mitigated if the offending islands were deleted, which came to be known as “elliptical repair” of island violations (see Merchant 2001 for extensive discussion, and Fox & Pesetsky 2005 for a generalized approach based on “cyclic linearization”).

Since Ross (1969), the scope of elliptical repair has expanded beyond amelioration of apparent island violations. In the ellipsis literature, move-and-delete analyses of many different phenomena invoke movements that would yield ungrammatical sentences if ellipsis were not applied, even without an island present. Consider Merchant’s (2004) influential move-and-delete analysis of fragment answers: Merchant argues convincingly that fragment XPs originate within clausal answers, but escape ellipsis of these clauses via movement (6). Crucially, (7) shows that this movement is ungrammatical without ellipsis.

This ellipsis dependency is common among analyses of move-and-delete phenomena, including pseudogapping (8) (Jayaseelan 2001, echoed by Merchant a.o.) and multiple fragment answers (10) (adapted from Merchant 2004:711):

The same state of affairs arises in well-motivated proposals for gapping (Coppock 2001), stripping (Depiante 2000), apparent non-constituent coordination (Sailor & Thoms, to appear), and other ellipsis phenomena (see Thoms, to appear, and Merchant 2010). Space restrictions preclude exemplifying each phenomenon, but they can all be shown to involve the derivation in (1), and, in each, ellipsis behaves like a well-formedness condition on the ellipsis-dodging movement: it facilitates convergence of a structure that is otherwise ill-formed. This is strongly reminiscent of apparent island repair in sluicing, except that examples such as (6) do not involve islands in the familiar sense.

There are, however, good reasons to question Ross’s (1969) initial claim that ellipsis can repair island violations (cf. Merchant 2001:ch. 4 and references therein). Recent work by Barros (to appear) and others provides compelling arguments that apparent cases of island repair in sluicing (qua TP ellipsis), e.g. (11), are actually illusory: they always and only arise when the missing material is recoverable either as some subpart of the island in the antecedent (the “short source” strategy: (11a)) or as a simple cleft (the “pseudosluicing”/“pseudofragment” strategy: (11b)), neither of which involves an island violation, as full recovery would (11c) (see Merchant 2001; example adapted from Barros (51)):

(11)They hired someone who speaks a Balkan language, but I don’t know which one.

a.…which onei[ they speak ti ]. Short source

b.…which onei[ it was ti ]. Pseudosluice

c.…which onei[ they hired someone who speaks ti ]. Full recovery

Given that the appearance of island repair only arises in environments where (11a) or (11b) is an available parse, there is no reason to believe that the parse in (11c) is ever available. As Barros and others point out, ellipsis sites are widely believed to contain silent structure, which in turn predicts that ellipsis should be unable to repair island violations. This prediction is maintained if (11c) is simply ruled out for the same reason its non-elided counterpart is.

That being said, if ellipsis is incapable of repairing island violations, then the analytical foundation of elliptical repair in general is called into question. Thus, our contribution to this volume—the core set of open questions we wish to pose—is:

(12)Can ellipsis ever rescue an illicit derivation, or are all apparent cases illusory?

a.If elliptical repair is real:

i.Is it a uniform phenomenon, perhaps operating on a natural class of structures or movement types within the general schema of (1), or is the appearance of uniformity accidental, and (1) perhaps too restrictive?

1.If it is a uniform phenomenon, what is the proper analysis of it?

2.If it is non-uniform, how can each case be accounted for without egregious additions to the grammar?

ii.Why is ellipsis able to repair the underlying deviance of move-and-delete derivations such as (6), (8) and (10), but unable to repair island violations?

b.If elliptical repair is illusory:

i.What mechanisms do the apparent cases reduce to?

ii.If some or all of the move-and-delete approach is to be maintained:

1.Are the movements indeed illicit (and therefore need repair), but repaired by something other than ellipsis?

2.Or are the movements actually not illicit, and we simply do not understand the underlying structure that is obscured by ellipsis (cf. pseudosluicing)?

We close with commentary on some of these questions.

It is commonly held that islands are not uniform phenomena, meaning any successful approach to (12a.ii) would presumably require uniformity of (some subpart of) the move-and-delete phenomena, part of the open question in (12a.i). Thus, those two questions may be implicationally related. That islands cannot be repaired is significant: it reins in the theory of repair, and potentially makes predictions about the nature of the repairable movement(s).

Regarding (12a.i), a comparative inversion phenomenon described in Merchant (2003) poses a challenge for unification of elliptical repair (13). It exhibits the same ellipsis dependency as the move-and-delete phenomena discussed above, but it differs from them by not obviously involving the move-and-delete derivation in (1). First, the illicit movement being repaired is head movement (T-to-C), not phrasal movement; second, the trace of this illicit movement is apparently outside the elided constituent:

Perhaps such cases (and others, including as-clauses: Merchant 2003) can be related to the move-and-delete phenomena we have been discussing; if so, a uniform approach to elliptical repair may be achievable.

References

Barros, Matthew. To appear. “A non-repair approach to island sensitivity in contrastive TP ellipsis.” In Proceedings from the forty-eighth Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society.

Sailor, Craig and Gary Thoms. To appear. “On the non-existence of non-constituent coordination and non-constituent ellipsis.” In Proceedings of the 31st West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. Cascadilla Press.

Thoms, Gary. To appear. “Constraints on exceptional ellipsis are only parallelism effects.” In NELS 43: Proceedings of the forty-third Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society. GLSA.